Museo internazionale delle marionette Antonio Pasqualino

The history of the museum is inextricably linked to Antonio Pasqualino, who died in 1995. He was a surgeon and an anthropologist from Palermo. He was a son of the painter Lia Noto and of Guglielmo Pasqualino di Marineo. Pasqualino in the second half of the Twentieth century worked to safeguard, promote and revitalize the Opera dei Pupi in a period of profound crisis for this theatrical practice. In 1965, together with a group of high-brows, he founded the Association for the Conservation of Popular Traditions and, together with his wife, Janne Vibaek collected many testimonies: from stage texts to puppets, theaters and furnishings, saving them from destruction and oblivion.
The economic and social transformation of Italy and Sicily in the middle of the last century caused the distancing of the traditional audience – mainly made up of men from the lower classes, who began to no longer mirror themselves in the models conveyed by the stories and characters of the shows. Empty of their traditional public, the puppeteers from all over Sicily began to close their theaters in search of more profitable activities, often selling or giving away their so-called "mestiere", or the set of theatrical props necessary for the staging of the shows.
After ten years of activity, the association founded the International Puppet Museum, in 1975, with the aim of restoring the heritage that Antonio Pasqualino had acquired in the meantime to Italian citizens: a “mestiere” of the Opera dei pupi pertaining to the Palermo school, belonging to the historic family of Gaspare Canino; and one of the Catania school, coming from the theater of Natale Meli.
Right from the start, the purely museographic activity of conservation and safeguarding of the museum heritage was combined with an intense…

The exhibition itinerary dysplays a collection consisting of over 5,000 animated figures (pupi, marionettes, hand puppets, shadow puppets), theatrical props and billboards, from Italy and from abroad. Some of them are used the eight traditional puppet theatres of different cultures and countries, that as well as Sicilian Opera dei Pupi, were declared by UNESCO "Masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity", and some contemporary artist's puppets created for the museum's new productions.

The Opera dei pupi and other UNESCO masterpieces
The first nuclei of the museum's collection were formed around the Sicilian Opera dei pupi. Today the museum houses the largest and most complete collection of pupi from Palermo, Catania and Naples and, among other things, it preserves the complete set of materials from three Opera dei pupi theaters: one of the Palermo tradition, which belonged to Gaspare Canino from Alcamo; one of the Catania tradition, which belonged to Natale Meli of Reggio Calabria; one of Neapolitan tradition that belonged to the Perna family of Frattamaggiore. The oldest pupo in the museum is "Carinda", dated to 1828 and once belonged to the Canino family. According to this family oral tradition, this marionette was the first armored pupo built by Don Liberto Canino.
The museum also exhibits other collections declared by UNESCO as "Masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity": the Japanese Ningyo Johruri Bunraku, the Indonesian Wayang kulit, the Cambodian shadow theater Sbek Thom, the puppet-masks of Nigeria-Benin called Gelede, Korea's puppet theater Namsadang Nori – Kkoktu-gaksi Norum, Turkish Karagöz and Sri Lanka's Rūkada Nātya puppets.

Animated figures in Europe and the East
The collection includes marionettes and hand puppets…